Happy new year!

Wow, it's finally 2006. My guess is that it'll take me at least two months before I stop writing 2005 on all my checks.

I had a fantastic break this year. Spent 10 days at home in Michigan, then came back to Boston on the 29th to celebrate New Year's with Josh. We didn't really make any plans to do anything special for New Year's Eve, but after looking around online to see what Beantown does to celebrate, we discovered First Night, which is basically a day-long event with a bunch of art displays, concerts, museum exhibits, puppet shows, etc. all around Boston. We made it to a few of the evening events, mainly admiring ice sculptures in Boston Commons and Copley Square.



This one is a sculpture of the number 30, not of "BO" (just in case you were wondering, like a few of people out that night). Anyway, there were some local TV personalities broadcasting live from Copley, so we stayed there for the big countdown. The whole thing was a lot of fun - you could tell that Boston was making a real effort to offer a family event; otherwise the city would have turned into pool of drunk twenty-somethings running around and screaming at midnight. However, amidst all the ridiculous hats and assorted junk food, street vendors were also selling these long horns that were like plastic versions of those long bugels you see in any Disney movie featuring a princess. Motivated, I suppose, by the same force that persuades people to wear oversized clown hats and giant 2006 glasses covered in glitter, a ton of people bought these horns. And they were really loud, like a horribly disorganized and out-of-tune orchestra of car horns.

But I digress. New Year's was a blast. :) Oh, and on the way out of the throngs of people in Copley Square after midnight, we passed a couple that had just gotten engaged!

So now it's back to real life... Josh has gone home, and I'm back to going to work every day. But at least classes won't start for another month. :)